Tag Archives: Andrew M. Grossman

ByDAVID B. RIVKIN JR. and ANDREW M. GROSSMAN

The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 31, 2017

Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Trump ’s nominee to succeed Justice Antonin Scalia, is a native Coloradan and avid outdoorsman. He clerked for a federal appellate judge and two Supreme Court justices and spent a decade practicing law before his appointment in 2006, at age 39, to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In the decade since, he has written some 850 opinions.

The way to take a judge’s measure is to read his opinions, and so we set out to review Judge Gorsuch’s. It was not an arduous task, for his prose is unusually engaging—think Scalia, with none of the abrasiveness. Justice Elena Kagan has declared herself a fan of his writing style. The only difficulty in summarizing Judge Gorsuch’s output is the compulsion to quote, at length, from so many of his opinions.

One opens this way: “Haunted houses may be full of ghosts, goblins, and guillotines, but it’s their more prosaic features that pose the real danger. Tyler Hodges found that out when an evening shift working the ticket booth ended with him plummeting down an elevator shaft.” The case, by the way, was a prosaic dispute between insurers. Another opinion starts: “What began as a fight at a strip club finds its way here as a clash over hearsay.”

Judge Gorsuch shows a concern for the people whose disputes are before the court. Each opinion typically begins with the name of the person seeking relief and why. A recent example: “After a bale of hay hit and injured Miriam White while she was operating her tractor, she sued the manufacturer, Deere & Company.” Ms. White’s appeal was summarily denied, but even the brief, three-page opinion reflects a serious engagement with her arguments and the facts—in contrast with the boilerplate language judges often use in such decisions. Win or lose, parties appearing before Judge Gorsuch surely know that they have been treated with fairness, consideration and respect.

These are not stylistic flourishes, but central to how Judge Gorsuch views the judicial role. “In our legal order,” he has written, “judges distinguish themselves from politicians by the oath they take to apply the law as it is, not to reshape the law as they wish it to be.” When a judge understands that he has no authority to legislate from the bench, cases that might otherwise be hard become straightforward exercises in applying law to facts.

Thus, Judge Gorsuch could recognize the “tragic circumstances” of a family whose daughter had died in a rafting accident, while still holding that the liability release she had signed was legally binding. That Colorado allows people to assume such risks, he explained, was a choice for the state’s General Assembly, not the court.

In a similar dissent, Judge Gorsuch argued for allowing a seventh-grader who was arrested for horseplay in gym class to sue the police officers, reasoning that no New Mexico statute authorized the arrest. And he has vigorously enforced rights of religious exercise under statutes like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, deferring to Congress’s decision to vindicate, as he put it, “this nation’s long-held aspiration to serve as a refuge of religious tolerance.”

Judge Gorsuch is among the judiciary’s most consistent and adept practitioners of textualism, the approach Scalia championed. In a memorial lecture last year, Judge Gorsuch said that “an assiduous focus on text, structure, and history is essential to the proper exercise of the judicial function.” Textualism, he added, serves to “confine the range of possible outcomes and provide a remarkably stable and predictable set of rules people are able to follow.” On the other hand, attempting to divine legislative intent, as he wrote in one opinion, is a “notoriously doubtful business.” Another opinion decried the judicial “conjuring” that substitutes the court’s view of optimal policy for Congress’s.

In an influential 2015 decision, Judge Gorsuch excavated the meaning of a law increasing penalties on anyone who “uses” a gun “during and in relation to” a drug offense. He carefully employed “plain old grade school grammar”—including a sentence diagram.

Judge Gorsuch’s textualism extends to the Constitution, quite emphatically: “That document,” he wrote, “isn’t some inkblot on which litigants may project their hopes and dreams for a new and perfected tort law, but a carefully drafted text judges are charged with applying according to its original public meaning.” Looking to the “original public meaning” of the Fourth Amendment, for example, Judge Gorsuch has rejected the government’s view that a search warrant could be applied across jurisdictional lines. He also disputed its claim that police officers may ignore “No Trespassing” signs to invade a homeowner’s property without a warrant.

What about the Constitution’s separation of powers, intended to safeguard liberty? Judge Gorsuch has been at the vanguard of applying originalism to the questions raised by today’s Leviathan state, which is increasingly controlled by unaccountable executive agencies. These questions loom large after the rash of executive actions by President Obama, and now the whiplash reversals by the Trump administration.

The deference that judges now must give to agencies’ interpretations of the law, he wrote in an opinion last year, permits the executive “to swallow huge amounts of core judicial and legislative power and concentrate federal power in a way that seems more than a little difficult to square with the Constitution of the framers’ design.”

Judge Gorsuch added: “Maybe the time has come to face the behemoth.” His addition to the Supreme Court would give the justices a better chance than ever to do precisely that.

Messrs. Rivkin and Grossman practice appellate and constitutional law with Baker & Hostetler in Washington.

An “alphabet soup” of federal agencies established since the 1930s have gradually supplanted the rule of Congress and the courts with the rule of supposed expertise. This accumulation of power is what James Madison identified in Federalist No. 47 as “the very definition of tyranny.” An example of this trend is the Securities and Exchange Commission’s increased use of in-house administrative law judges under the Obama administration.

Following high-profile losses in federal court—remember the insider trading charges against Mark Cuban?—the SEC decided to file fewer enforcement cases in courts presided over by independent judges. Instead, the agency began to take advantage of its in-house administrative law judges. Conveniently, a change in the Dodd-Frank Act authorized the agency’s judges to hear more kinds of cases and dispense more penalties.

Administrative law judges are agency employees. The proceedings they oversee provide fewer protections than court cases. They also tend to set stern deadlines and limit the right to factual investigation, often leaving defendants to rely on the SEC’s evidence. According to a 2015 Wall Street Journal analysis, the agency’s shift paid off: Through the beginning of that year, it won 90% of cases in its in-house court, compared with 69% of regular court cases. Administrative decisions can be appealed to court but are rarely reversed. That’s because the judges apply a deferential “clear error” standard to the agency’s factual findings.

The due-process problems inherent in this arrangement are apparent. Less obvious, at least to the SEC, is that it also violates the Constitution’s Appointments Clause, which requires Senate hearings and confirmation votes for department heads and other senior officials. To promote political accountability, the Constitution also requires that “inferior officers” with significant responsibility be appointed by the president or senior officials who are confirmed by the Senate.

This month, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the SEC’s administrative law judges aren’t mere employees but inferior officers. They take testimony, rule on motions, issue subpoenas, preside over triallike hearings, make factual determinations and can even enter judgments and impose penalties in certain circumstances. The court’s analysis was guided by a 1991 Supreme Court decision holding the same about “special trial judges” who had similar powers under the U.S. Tax Court. The SEC will surely appeal, and there is a high likelihood that the Supreme Court will affirm the lower court’s ruling.

The immediate problem for the SEC is that Congress hasn’t authorized the appointment of administrative law judges through the constitutional process. So the agency faces the risk, in cases it tries in-house, that its decisions will be voided. The SEC and its allies will push for a legislative fix so that in-house judges can be properly appointed. Congressional Republicans should use the demand for legislation as a bargaining chip for other reforms, such as restricting cases that can be heard in administrative courts.

But a legislative fix only heightens the contradictions of trying these cases outside of real courts. Due process requires that judges be neutral. A fix would make them political appointees.

Moreover, in Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Accounting Oversight Board(2010), the Supreme Court struck down an arrangement whereby appointed officers were double-insulated from removal. They could lose their jobs only for good cause, and the agency head with the power to remove them could himself only be fired for good cause. That kind of double protection, the court explained, impermissibly “subverts the President’s ability to ensure that the laws are faithfully executed” and “the public’s ability to pass judgment on his efforts.”

Administrative law judges are nearly identically insulated from political control. They can be dismissed only for good cause by their agencies, and even then only if the Merit Systems Protection Board agrees. If the 10th Circuit’s decision is upheld, this will almost certainly be the next shoe to drop, and it will leave administrative law judges subject to political control.

That means the in-house judges will be political appointees subject to the supervision of other political appointees—and at risk of dismissal for failure to follow instructions. Will agencies be able to maintain the pretense that they are “judges” in any meaningful sense? It’s difficult to see how.

The SEC’s overreaching may spell the end of the administrative state’s growth—marking the point when Congress and the courts started to regain lost ground. Thanks, Mr. Obama.

Messrs. Rivkin and Grossman practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington, D.C.

President Obama pledged to wield a pen and phone during his second term rather than engage with Congress. The slew of executive orders, enforcement memorandums, regulations and “Dear Colleague” letters comprised an unprecedented assertion of executive authority. Equally unparalleled is the ease with which the Obama agenda can be dismantled. Among the first actions on President Trump’s chopping block should be the Clean Power Plan.

In 2009 Congress rejected a cap-and-trade scheme to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. The Environmental Protection Agency then devised a nearly identical scheme to mandate shifting electricity generation from disfavored facilities, like those powered by coal, to those the EPA prefers, like natural gas and renewables. No statute authorized the EPA to seize regulatory control of the nation’s energy sector. The agency instead discovered, in an all-but-forgotten 1970s-era provision of the Clean Air Act, that it had that power all along.

To support its preferred policy, the agency was compelled to “interpret” the statute in a way that contradicts what it acknowledges is the “literal” reading of the text and clashes with decades of its own regulations. It also nullifies language blocking regulation for power plants because they are already regulated under an alternative program. By mangling the Clean Air Act to intrude on areas it was never meant to, the regulation violates the constitutional bar on commandeering the states to carry out federal policy.

These defects are why the Supreme Court put the EPA’s plan on hold while an appeals court in Washington, D.C., considers challenges brought by the energy industry and 27 states. These legal challenges now appear to have been overtaken by events. President Trump can immediately issue an executive order to adopt a new energy policy that respects the states’ role in regulating energy markets and that prioritizes making electricity affordable and reliable. Such an order should direct the EPA to cease all efforts to enforce and implement the Clean Power Plan. The agency would then extend all of the regulation’s deadlines, enter an administrative stay and commence regulatory proceedings to rescind the previous order.

That would leave the D.C. appeals court—which some supporters of the plan are still counting on for a Hail Mary save—or the Supreme Court with little choice but to send the legal challenges back to the agency. While the Clean Power Plan could technically linger in the Code of Federal Regulations for a year or so, it would have no legal force.

When an agency changes course, it must provide a reasoned explanation to address factual findings supporting its prior policy. In certain instances that requirement may impose a real burden. For example, a rule rescinding the EPA’s “Endangerment Finding” regarding the effects of greenhouse gases would have to address the evidence underlying it. A failure to provide a satisfactory explanation of a change in policy may render a rule “arbitrary and capricious” and vulnerable to legal challenge.

Environmentalist groups have already vowed to bring suit to defend the Clean Power Plan, but a challenge would be toothless. The aggressive legal positions underlying the Obama administration’s most controversial rules—including the Clean Power Plan, the Waters of the United States rule, and the FCC’s Open Internet order—will make it easier to rescind them. That’s because rejecting the assertion of legal authority underlying such a rule is enough to justify a policy change. If the agency’s view is that it simply lacks the power to carry out a rule, then it follows that the rule must be withdrawn.

Even if a court were to find that the EPA’s interpretation of the Clean Air Act underlying the plan is permissible, that would still not compel the Trump EPA to accept that interpretation as the only permissible one. And even if a court were to rule—erroneously, in our view—that the Clean Power Plan does not violate the Constitution’s vertical separation of powers, that would still not absolve the executive branch of the responsibility to consider that constitutional issue for itself and then act accordingly.

President Obama may soon come to understand that the presidential pen and phone is a double-edged sword.

Messrs. Rivkin and Grossman, who practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington, D.C., represent the state of Oklahoma and the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality in their challenge to the Clean Power Plan.

After Congress turned down President Obama ’s request to enact a law regulating power plants’ greenhouse-gas emissions, the Environmental Protection Agency turned to the states—not with a request, but with instructions to carry out the president’s energy policy. The EPA’s “Clean Power Plan” now faces the scrutiny of the nation’s chief regulatory review court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

If the Constitution’s federalism is to endure, the Clean Power Plan must be struck down.

The Constitution establishes a federal government of limited and enumerated powers while the states retain a plenary “police power,” subject only to the specific limitations of federal law. This is what Justice Anthony Kennedy called the Constitution’s “genius”: It “split the atom of sovereignty” to ensure accountability when meeting both local and national concerns, while fostering rivalry between the two levels to curb excessive political ambition that might threaten liberty.

Only in recent decades did politicians learn how to realize their ambitions through collusion. The federal government now entices states with transfer payments to establish and administer social-welfare programs. And, in schemes that the courts describe as “cooperative federalism,” it offers states the choice to regulate their citizens according to federal dictates, as an alternative to the feds regulating directly and having states get out of the way.

Even these approaches were not enough for the Obama administration to cajole the states to carry out its energy agenda. So it resolved to obliterate one of the last vestiges of the Constitution’s vertical separation of powers: the bar on federal commandeering of the states and their officials to carry out federal policy.

The Clean Power Plan is enormously complicated, but its overall approach is straightforward. Previous emissions regulations have focused on reducing emissions from particular facilities, but this one relies on shifting electricity generation from disfavored facilities (coal-fired power plants) to those the EPA prefers (natural gas and renewables). The EPA then determined what, in its view, is the maximum amount of such shifting that each of the nation’s regional electric grids could possibly accommodate and calculated the emissions reductions.

Parcel those figures out by state, factor in additional reductions due to estimated efficiency improvements at older plants, and the result is state-specific reduction targets. The states can elect to achieve those targets themselves—or, if they decline, the EPA will do it for them. “Textbook cooperative federalism,” says the EPA.

Not quite. Whether or not the states choose to implement the plan directly, it leaves them no choice but to carry out the EPA’s federal climate policy. That’s because the EPA can destroy but not create. It can regulate emissions of existing facilities, but it lacks the legal authority to facilitate the construction and integration of new power sources, which is ultimately the only way to achieve the plan’s aggressive targets.

That duty falls to the states, which the plan depends upon to carry out what the EPA calls their “responsibility to maintain a reliable electric system.” Doing nothing, as in the cooperative federalism scenario, is not an option.

So this is how the plan works: The EPA pushes coal-fired plants off the grid, and then counts on the states to ensure that the resulting reductions in capacity are matched by increases in EPA-preferred forms of power generation. State agencies will have to be involved in decommissioning coal-fired plants, addressing replacement capacity—like wind turbines and solar arrays—addressing transmission and integration issues, and undertaking all manner of related regulatory proceedings. All this to carry out federal policy.

The Clean Power Plan implicates every evil associated with unconstitutional commandeering. It dragoons states into administering federal law, irrespective of their citizens’ views. It destroys accountability, by directing the brunt of public disapproval for increased electricity costs and lost jobs onto state officials, when the federal government deserves the blame. And it subverts the horizontal separation of powers, by allowing the executive branch to act where Congress has refused to legislate.

One can only wonder what will be left of our constitutional order if the plan passes judicial muster.

The federal government would no longer be a government of limited powers, but instead be able to compel the states to do its bidding in any area. The states, in turn, would be reduced to puppets of a federal ventriloquist, carrying out the dirty work for which federal actors wish to avoid accountability. And the federal executive, in many instances, could effectively create new law by working through the states, free of the need to win over Congress.

So it is difficult to imagine a U.S. where the Clean Power Plan is the law of the land. It would not be the same country, or the same Constitution, that Americans have enjoyed all these years.

Messrs. Rivkin and Grossman practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington, D.C., and represent the State of Oklahoma and the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality in their challenge to the Clean Power Plan.

This past July, the cronyist government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro threw out more than half of the signatures on a petition for a recall to remove him from office, citing “unclear handwriting.”

That is not a problem shared by Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, whose autopen machine traces a perfectly legible facsimile of his signature every time. Following the autocratic example of Venezuela and other rule-of-law pariahs, McAuliffe has his autopen working overtime to transform Virginia into a banana republic, one signature at a time.

The signatures — a mere 206,000 or so of them — are the centerpiece of McAuliffe’s scheme to circumvent the Virginia Supreme Court’s July ruling striking down his executive order that suspended the Virginia Constitution’s general rule stripping felons’ voting rights. The court agreed with legislative leaders who had challenged the order that it was not a legitimate exercise of the governor’s power to grant clemency in particular cases. It was, instead, an unlawful attempt to suspend the operation of a law simply because the governor disagrees with it.

Does he ever. The same day that the decision issued, McAuliffe told the press that he “cannot accept” it. A few days later, citing the venerable maxim that “you’ve got to do what you got to do,” he vowed that “all 206,000 (felons) will have their rights back” in a matter of weeks.

Thus, the autopen. Rather than a single bulk order suspending an entire felon-voting bar, McAuliffe would achieve the same result by issuing an individual order for each felon in Virginia who has completed his or her incarceration and supervised release. On Aug. 22, the governor announced that he had issued 13,000 orders restoring voting rights for the felons who had registered to vote under the order struck down by the Supreme Court and promised (many) more to come.

In response, the same legislators who defeated McAuliffe’s first order have asked the Virginia Supreme Court to hold the governor in contempt and act to enforce its prior judgment.

As their motion exhaustively describes, McAuliffe’s new orders amount to outright defiance of the court’s earlier decision. That decision did not turn on the fact that McAuliffe had issued a blanket order, but instead focused on the “practical effect” of that order as nullifying the law. The new orders have the same effect as the old one, unilaterally suspending the operation of the constitution’s felon-voting bar in precisely the same way, with respect to precisely the same persons. As the legislators’ contempt motion observes, the “Court did not reduce the suspension clause of the Constitution to a printing requirement.”

Indeed, seeking to foreclose further legalistic scheming, the court took pains to state that a Virginia governor cannot “suspend unilaterally the enforcement of any criminal law in the Code of Virginia, based solely on his personal disagreement with it, simply by issuing categorical, absolute pardons to everyone” subject to it. And it made clear that proper exercise of the pardon power requires a “specific request by individuals seeking such relief” and consideration of their “individual circumstances.”

So, whether the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision got the law right or wrong, there is no disputing that McAuliffe’s current actions clash with what it ruled. And that is reason enough for the court to hold the governor in contempt and invalidate his flurry of orders.

But the stakes are far higher than in the last round. McAuliffe’s disrespect for the law and for a co-equal branch of government threatens the freedom and political rights of all Virginians. It is worth recalling President John Kennedy’s admonition, offered in response to defiance of the court-ordered desegregation of the University of Mississippi, that “observance of the law is the eternal safeguard of liberty and defiance of the law is the surest road to tyranny.” As Americans, we are free “to disagree with the law but not to disobey it.”

That principle applies with special force to those whom we entrust with the power and responsibility to carry out the law. Nicolas Maduro may be above the law, but Terry McAuliffe and his autopen are not.

David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew M. Grossman practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington, D.C.

By DAVID B. RIVKIN, JR. and ANDREW M. GROSSMAN
September 7, 2016, in the Wall Street Journal

To those counting the days until Nov. 8 when the presidential election campaign will finally end, some bad news: The contest won’t truly be decided until the Electoral College’s vote on Dec. 19. Then again, this could be good news for Americans who still hope to escape the dilemma presented by the major parties’ nomination of two unpopular candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump—but only if the electors’ constitutionally guaranteed independence is observed in the face of state laws seeking to control their votes.

America’s method of presidential selection is as peculiar and clever as the federalism and separation-of-powers principles that fostered it. To guard against the passions of populism, the Framers interposed a college of state-based electors between voters and the actual presidential selection. To discourage political obligation and intrigue, they provided that the electors would meet just once, in their respective states, for the sole purpose of casting ballots for the next president and vice president.

And to prevent the presidency from being captured by regional interests, they required the winner to obtain a majority of the Electoral College votes. Failing that, the election is thrown to the House of Representatives, to choose among the top three vote-getters.

Today, the Electoral College vote is regarded as a nearly mechanical process: The parties nominate their slates, elector seats are awarded (in most states) to the popular vote winner’s party slate, and a few weeks later the electors certify what the people have already chosen.

In an unusual campaign year like this one, however, that may be too much to take for granted. Electors are typically party stalwarts, but many ideologically committed Democrats and Republicans lack enthusiasm for this year’s top-of-ticket candidates. Several would-be Republican electors are already publicly flirting with the idea of casting their votes for someone other than Mr. Trump, believing that his erratic outbursts have “disqualified” him from being president.

Right or wrong, that is exactly the kind of discernment that the Constitution demands electors exercise. It was their duty, Alexander Hamilton explained, to ensure that “the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”

Instead, representing the interests of their states and constituents, the electors would vote only for those possessing “the esteem and confidence of the whole Union” sufficient to win the requisite majority vote, thereby providing “a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue.” If the parties have failed in that task, then it falls to the electors to provide a final check.

Elector independence is also a practical necessity. Federal law provides no other means to respond to the death or incapacitation of the popular vote-winner after Election Day but before the Electoral College votes. Likewise, death or disability shortly before Election Day may present the same quandary, given state-law delays in altering ballots. And should electors blind themselves to revelations of corruption or foreign control that might emerge in the weeks before they meet? To deal with all of these contingencies, the Framers’ intention was that electors would exercise their discretion and judgment.

As a matter of original constitutional meaning, elector independence is not a controversial proposition. Both Article II of the Constitution and the 12th Amendment, which clarified the selection of the vice president, provide that electors shall “vote by ballot,” a term of art referring to secret ballots rather than publicly cast votes.

By contrast, other constitutional provisions use words like “choose” or “election” that do not indicate secrecy. Voting in secret is the means by which electors may exercise their discretion, free from any attempt to control their vote.

Nonetheless, 29 states and the District of Columbia have laws on the books purporting to bind electors to vote for their party’s candidate or in accord with the state’s popular vote. Some enforce those mandates with fines or even criminal penalties—typically a misdemeanor charge. Others regard the casting of a “faithless” elector vote as resignation from the post and cancellation of the ballot. Despite dozens of electors choosing over the years to cast ballots for someone other than their party’s candidate or to abstain, these laws have never been enforced. Nonetheless, their very existence misleads the public and, even worse, chills electors from discharging their duty to exercise judgment.

The time is ripe to put an end to this legal charade and establish, as federal-court precedent, that the Constitution forbids enforcement of elector-binding mandates. The Supreme Court ruled in a 1952 decision, Ray v. Blair , that delegate pledges are unobjectionable, as nothing prevents an elector from announcing his intended vote beforehand. But the court recognized that enforcement of pledges raises constitutional concerns.

State courts that have considered the matter have held that elector pledges can impose, in the words of the Supreme Court of Ohio in 1948, only “a moral obligation, not a legal one.” As that court concluded, when a state attempts to “dictate to the electors the choice which they must make for president and vice president, it has invaded the field set apart to the electors by the Constitution of the United States, and such action cannot stand.”

Messrs. Rivkin and Grossman practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington, D.C. They represented Beau Correll, a delegate to the Republican National Convention, in his successful legal challenge to Virginia’s delegate-binding statute.

By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew M. Grossman in the Washington Post,June 21, 2016

In the aftermath of horrific terrorist massacres such as the Orlando nightclub shooting, the natural impulse of the American people is to ask what the government can do to prevent such tragedies. Securing public safety is indeed the government’s most important job; keeping guns away from terrorists has obvious value. But this must be done in a way that complies with the Constitution.

This admonition has animated much of the recent debate about the rules governing National Security Agency surveillance of suspected terrorists. Regrettably, it has not been embraced in the gun control debate unfolding in the aftermath of Orlando.

Yet the Constitution’s due process protections are the vital safeguard of individual liberty and mitigate against arbitrary government action by setting the procedures the government must observe when it seeks to deprive an individual of a given substantive right.

Constitutionally “appropriate” procedure varies based on the importance of the right at issue and the risk of an erroneous deprivation of that right, and the government’s interest. For example, while government officials may commit a person who is dangerous to himself or others on an emergency basis, a judicial determination of the validity of the commitment must follow. Law enforcement officers may arrest a person they believe to be guilty of a crime, but the person who has been arrested is entitled to appear before a judge.

Our legal traditions spell out the process that is due for the categories of people currently denied the right to keep and bear arms. Those include felons and those charged with felonies, people adjudged “mentally defective” and those dishonorably discharged from the military. The unifying factor is that people subject to these bars have all received their day in court.

But that’s not the case with the new gun control proposals. One proposal is to block gun sales to those named on the terrorist watch list maintained by the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center. The list, however, is entirely unsuited to that task.

According to National Counterterrorism Center guidance, agencies can add someone to the list based on a “reasonable suspicion” or “articulable evidence” that the person is a “known or suspected terrorist.” Listings can be based on anything from civilian tips and social-media postings to actual government investigations. The guidance makes clear that “irrefutable evidence or concrete facts are not necessary.”

The predictable result is a very long list, with entries of varying quality. As of July 2014, the main list contained about 800,000 names. More than 40 percent are designated as having “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.” This kind of list may be valuable for prioritizing counterterrorism activities, supporting investigations and determining where additional scrutiny may be warranted, such as with visa applications.

However, the watch list was never intended to be used to punish listed individuals by depriving them of their constitutionally protected rights. And, legally, it is unsuitable for that task. While there is an administrative redress process to remove a name from the list, there is no judicial review, no hearing and not even notification of whether a request was granted or denied, much less the grounds of the decision.

The no-fly list, which contained about 47,000 names in 2013, is subject to the same shortcomings. Individuals are never informed why they’ve been listed and have no opportunity for a hearing before a neutral judge to clear their names. In court filings, the government has explained that the list represents officials’ “predictive judgments” about who may pose a threat. Whatever the merits of that approach as applied to the eligibility for air travel, it falls far short of the kind of concrete proof and procedure necessary to deprive a person of a constitutionally protected right.

Even narrower approaches being bandied about raise similar concerns. For example, an amendment by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) would authorize the attorney general to block a firearms sale if the attorney general determined that the buyer was engaged in conduct relating to terrorism. The amendment does provide that a frustrated buyer may bring a lawsuit in federal court to challenge a denial. But its text suggests that this is just window dressing: The attorney general may withhold the evidence underlying the denial from the plaintiff, placing the burden on the plaintiff to prove his innocence by rebutting evidence that he’s never seen.

Those agitating for firearms restrictions now should understand that the precedent they set is a dangerous one that extends far beyond the realm of the Second Amendment. If the government’s say-so is sufficient to block a gun sale — thereby abridging a right enumerated in the Constitution, with little or no ability for redress — what right wouldn’t be at risk of arbitrary deprivation, particularly among the powerless?

David B. Rivkin Jr. served in the White House counsel’s office and the Justice Department in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. Andrew M. Grossman is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. They practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington.